Duh v D'oh

[Nigel Rantor]

Paul Makepeace wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 7, 2008 at 11:48 AM, Peter Corlett <abuse at cabal.org.uk> wrote:
> 
>> On Thu, Nov 06, 2008 at 05:00:16PM +0000, Nigel Rantor wrote:
>>> Paul Makepeace wrote:
>> [...]
>>>> If it's not staring out at you, you're possibly also a python
>> programmer.
>>>> Python here arguably DWIM better than perl.
>>> Does python give you the keys by default?
>> Sort of. In Python, "for" loops over values returned by an iterator, and a
>> hash implements that interface.

But by interface here we just mean it implements certain named methods 
that have certain semantics that everyone agrees make it an 
iterator...right?

I mean, it's like C++ and templates, we duck type things rather than 
actually implement interfaces as you are required to do in Java.

> The interface is pretty clean,
> 
> my_dict = {'a': 1, 'b': 2}
> for k in my_dict:
>   print k
> 
> gives,
> a
> b
> 
> for k, v in my_dict.items():
>   print k, v
> 
> gives,
> a 1
> b 2
> 
> (ObPedantry, .iteritems() is preferred since it evaluates lazily with a
> generator.)

Yes, well, Perl has 'each' for iterating over pairs, so they look almost 
identical. The main difference I can see is that python defaults to 
assuming you want the keys of a hash when iterating rather than the values.

It's a fair enough design decision, but like any decision it's not 
always going to be the right thing. But yes, I agree, it is kind of 
DWIMier than iterating over both keys and values for a hash.

If you look around though, lots of languages do this better than Perl 
these days. I was going to mention some languages but I can't be arsed 
with the inevitable flaming session.

   n

p.s. I'm still reading the python list for a laugh. they just had a 
*HUGE* rant/discussion about what "rebinding" means and how you describe 
it to people coming from other languages.